How Conagra Kicks Low-Quality Impressions To The Curb

Conagra, which owns brands like Chef Boyardee and Orville Redenbacher’s, is no newbie at negotiating for better ad quality.

In 2014, it started using comScore’s digital ad effectiveness tools to negotiate delivery guarantees with publishers to ensure display inventory was in view and seen by humans.

But ConAgra wants both publishers and advertisers to work harder to root out invalid traffic and improve ad quality.

“We’ve been tackling this problem for over three years, even before we had a data management platform,” said Heather Dumford, global marketing director for media and advertising technology for ConAgra Brands. “Early on, when we first made our declaration, it threw publishers like Google for a loop. Even today, they don’t really love the idea of third-party anything, so there will always be challenges.”

Even though bad impressions will always slip through the cracks because of the realities of today’s supply chain, ConAgra tries to proactively guarantee the quality of the media it buys.

ConAgra wants to pluck out questionable impressions before the bid and ad serve take place, so it reduces the need for post-campaign makegoods.

It uses comScore to blacklist cookies or IDs that may be associated with fraud or bad traffic, then ingests that data into its Salesforce/Krux DMP to ensure the company doesn’t bid against any of it. ConAgra also performs additional blocking with DoubleVerify because "no solution is perfect."

Although the comScore data helped form the basis of the brand's viewability and audience delivery guarantees with publishers, augmenting it with a DMP made it more prescriptive.

“We had three years’ worth of data that showed where all of this fraud was coming from, but without having a DMP like Krux in the mix, that comScore data was not necessarily something we could use this proactively,” Dumford added.

ConAgra estimates that as a result of its work with comScore, DoubleVerify and Krux, it has reduced its exposure to nonhuman or invalid traffic by as much as 50%.

ConAgra also uses Krux to improve cross-device media and creative sequencing. The CPG giant knows, for instance, which consumers engage most with its brands’ websites, or which products are most redeemed with digital coupons.

First-party data becomes a lot more meaningful when it’s synced back to its DMP and combined with third-party survey data or second-party publisher data.

Dumford thinks Krux’s deep-seated relationship with publishers is a competitive differentiator in a sea of DMP-DSP hybrids. As is its Krux Link system, which connects data owners like publishers with data buyers through a blind match.

“Through their publisher relationships, they’re able to get this single view of a consumer,” Dumford said. “For instance, they would know when someone who logs in on three different devices is the same person using Spotify or Pandora. Therefore, when we see somebody across several different devices, we know it’s the same person when we do cross-device mapping.”